When you’re making a book, not everything you’d like to include makes the final cut. I had to let many signs go during the development of India Street Lettering, and among them were advertisements for astrologers, their tchotchkes and services (psst… if you generously supported the book’s Kickstarter campaign at the right tier, you will receive one as a postcard).
Funny story — I gobbled up Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs when I was barely eight or nine years old. An uncle forgot his copy at our house, and let’s just say that I was the kind of kid who would read anything she could lay her hands on: a user manual, for instance, or a 500-page opus dedicated to a dubious pseudoscience. After finishing the book, I even spent some weeks trying to find out my homeroom teacher’s birthday in the hopes that I could then get her to like me more, but it didn’t take me long to realise that it was all bunkum.
Thankfully, this skepticism hasn’t come in the way of me from enjoying astrology-related street signs years later. The most delightful ones from my documentation come from Bangalore. I photographed them near Bazaar Street and the Someshwara Temple in Ulsoor, some as far as CMH Road into Indiranagar. What makes them special is that they are all variations on the same design template. An open palm is placed at the centre, sometimes with its “palmistry lines” highlighted, and it is surrounded by varying amounts of information about the services offered. The colours are primary, and red, yellow and green dominate. The text is usually a mix of Kannada and English.
On my last field trip to the neighbourhood, I captured two signs of the same shop. One sign focused on a Kannada audience and the other on an English-speaking one. The signs are alike, but not quite identical. The English word “Astrologer” makes an appearance in the Kannada sign, bumping the phone number lower in the composition. I am an avowed fan of the style of Latin lettering used on these signs, and one day, I hope to translate it into a multi-width typeface family — just don’t ask me when.
The other city where I came across a surfeit of astrology-related signs is Haridwar, but they didn’t pack the same punch. My favourite from those parts is the sign for a shop called Mohan Rudraksha Emporium, which showcases an excellent example of mimicry of material. Letters were drawn on a flat metal sheet, cut out, painted to look like wood, and then attached to the sign, which has a painted shadow for them. All this to give them an extra lift and dimension. What a wonderful use of limited resources!
Get your copy of India Street Lettering: A Journey Through Typographic Craft & Culture from Blaft Publications.